Tampopo

Ramen and Sex and Gansters. If I had to use five words to describe the movie Tampopo, those would be my choices. Appropriate, I think, for a movie that begins with two truckers reading a rediculous book called Zen and the Art of Noodle Eating and ends with a slow zoom of a Japanese woman (previously unseen) breastfeeding her baby. The main plot is that a 30 somethings widow, named Tampopo (or Dandelion) owns a crappy ramen restaurant and wants to improve. To this end she employs the help of the two truckers in the opening scene, the culinary master of a group of gourmet hobos, a rich man's private chef (who is donated to her cause because she saved the rich man from choking), and her admirer, who happens to be an interior designer of sorts. Sounds simple enough, but this group treats ramen making like an olympic sport, pushing Tampopo through drills in speed, flavour, accuracy, strength, texture, and more. The main plot feels, somehow, like an American Western, complete with tough guys, slow-smiling females, and ramen-tasting scenes with all the intensity of the final shootout. But the main plot only composes roughly half of the movie - the rest is random vignettes. Some of these return to the same gangster, who is obsessed with food, sex, death, and combining the three, whether it's by relatively standard food play with his mistress, or passing an unbroken egg yolk between their mouths, slow kiss by slow kiss, or eating a fresh oyster out of the hand of a young girl, or talking about 'yam sausage' in his last minutes of life. Others are even more random - an etiquette class for young women which emphasizes that the Japanese slurping of noodles is taboo in the west - or a business dinner where a quiet and low-level young man embarrasses his colleagues and superiors with his encyclopedic knowledge of French cuisine. It's a very strange movie.